An undercurrent of menace

12:01AM BST 23 Aug 2007

Susanna Yager reviews the latest crime fiction

Adrian Hyland's Diamond Dove is an amazingly accomplished first novel with a memorable heroine. Emily Tempest, a half-Aboriginal 29-year-old, is the survivor of a decade of aimless travelling, three uncompleted degree courses and a succession of dead-end jobs. Now she has returned to her childhood home in the outback to visit her Aboriginal family and friends.

Within hours, one of them is savagely killed and suspicion immediately falls on a notorious renegade member of the group. Emily, however, comes to believe that at least one other person had a motive for the murder and her determination to discover the truth leads to a terrifying battle for survival in the outback.

Hyland's hard-hitting prose has conjured up not only the atmosphere but the spirit of this remote little community and its colourful inhabitants. He is definitely a writer to watch.

The narrator of I See You, by Gregg Hurwitz, a successful crime novelist, is widely believed to have murdered his ex-lover, only escaping conviction on the grounds of temporary insanity due to a brain tumour that wiped out his memory of the event.

Deserted by all but a few of his friends, he is trying to get his life together when another woman is killed and he once again becomes the prime suspect. With a pair of determined policemen following his movements, eager to prove his guilt, he is unable to shake off the fear that he may have committed the first murder, but is convinced that someone is trying to frame him for the second.

Hurwitz's intelligent, skilfully plotted thriller, with its clever mystery and undercurrent of menace, is a gripping read.